Exactly when he conceived the idea of a prologue to precede and explain the opening scene of Stasov’s scenario is likewise unclear. Perhaps it was as late as 1883, the date usually given. But there are circumstantial reasons for suggesting 1876. For one thing, he seems to have composed the G-major chorus that eventually replaced the original epilogue in or soon after that year.6 Then there is the question of the eclipse, which darkens the stage like an evil omen just as Igor and his retinue are about to set out on their campaign against the Polovtsï. In Stasov, this portent is merely described to Yaroslavna by a group of merchants who have witnessed the battle and Igor’s defeat. But Borodin did away with the merchants by 1879 at the latest; and to accompany the eclipse in the prologue he used material from the apparitions scene in Mlada, material that had also cropped up in the first (“monologue”) version of Igor’s aria, but which came available once again when that version was discarded at the end of 1875. On the principle of Occam’s razor, it looks as if these various decisions were all taken at the same time, even if Borodin was as usual unable to implement them all at once.
The one other piece we can be certain that he composed in 1876 is the duet for Yaroslavna and Igor on Igor’s unexpected return to Putivl in the fourth act, and the beautiful recitative for Yaroslavna that precedes it. Miserably she contemplates the devastation in the countryside around the city, laid waste by the victorious Polovtsian army. Yekaterina Borodina recalled that her husband composed this music at the end of their summer holiday in the village of Staraya Ruza, not far to the west of Moscow, after being unable to cross the Moscow River on his way home to St. Petersburg, and having been forced to wait on the riverbank and watch “the rushing torrent, and the gray dreary waves leaping and surging.”7 “How cheerless is everything around,” sings Yaroslavna, to an exquisite melody that might well have come out of the Balakirev or Prokunin collection. Borodin went back to Staraya Ruza and improvised this piece on the piano there.8 The rest of the number—Yaroslavna’s excited dotted-rhythm più mosso to a hesitantly major version of the recitative tune, and the brilliant duet that follows—was probably composed that autumn in St. Petersburg. Like almost everything else in the opera, they were written without much concern for the dramatic trajectory of the action as a whole, but with a vivid image of the situation. Like the pieces in a child’s jigsaw puzzle, they fitted perfectly into the space marked “recognition duet.” As for the adjacent pieces, they would no doubt turn up in good time.
As if all this random operatic composition were not enough to fill his almost nonexistent spare time, Borodin now encountered a fresh aggravation. His Second Symphony was slated for its first performance at an RMS concert in February 1877, and suddenly the orchestral scores he had made of the first and last movements were nowhere to be found. Then, just when he needed to produce the material for a meeting with Nápravník at the end of November, he fell ill once again and had to take to his bed. In despair he pleaded with Rimsky-Korsakov to help him with the rescoring and recopying. Then, within days, the scherzo and andante also vanished without trace. Luckily, Stasov remembered seeing them on Shestakova’s piano, covered up by a poster, and Borodin sent his adoptive son-in-law, Alexander Dianin, to collect them, relieved that they had not, as he had feared, got mixed up with a shopping bag of sausages and vegetables and dropped in the street. In the end, still under the weather but with Rimsky-Korsakov’s help, he somehow managed to rescore the missing outer movements and have the parts copied in time for the rehearsals.
So haphazard was this whole train of events that one inevitably wonders whether the slightly clumsy scoring of some parts of the symphony had anything to do with the sense of panic that attended its birth. Rimsky-Korsakov reports that in their work together (he admits to consultation rather than contribution), they got very excited about the brass instruments, under the influence of Rimsky’s inspectorial expertise, and as a result Borodin overwrote badly for that section. Nápravník, Rimsky claims, had to conduct the scherzo well below the proper tempo, simply because the brass players could not manage the rapid chord changes required. The performance as a whole was a noisy failure: noisy not only because of the heavy orchestration but because, as Alexander Dianin noted, “the audience created a proper racket, reminiscent of a cat’s concert.”9 Another friend remembered that “the first movement was received very coldly and when somebody started clapping you could hear hissing. The whole work was received in this way, and the composer wasn’t called out.”10 Borodin revised the orchestration for an FMS concert under Rimsky-Korsakov himself two years later (February 1879), and this time the performance went off well enough; but problems remained, and remain to this day, with a work of such stunning originality and inventive flair, mitigated here and there by a certain awkwardness of facture, especially in its rhythmic and orchestral detail.
By the time of the symphony’s premiere, a good deal of Prince Igor existed in one form or another. But the chaos of Borodin’s working methods is glaringly apparent from a simple inventory of the movements composed thus far. In terms of the numberings in the eventual score, and in approximate order of composition, they were: nos. 3, 9, 7, 18, 15, 25, 8, 2 (part), 17, 21 (part), 27, 29, 1 (part). And even this list flatters the coherence of the actual material. Only two or three pieces were orchestrated, and some were in draft form or in other ways incomplete. There was still no libretto and no proper scenario apart from Stasov’s original, from which Borodin had significantly deviated. The composition of Yaroslavna’s “Moscow River” recitative, on an impulse and apparently without any prior plan, was entirely typical. In the same way, in 1877 he composed a recitative and cavatina for Vladimir Igorevich, and the following duet with Konchakovna (nos. 11 and 12), supposedly under the influence of an aborted relationship with a young girl who fell in love with him and whom, according to his wife’s tactful account, he had great difficulty “in treating … as a daughter.”11 Such connections may be nebulous; but the mere fact that they can plausibly be made is suggestive enough in itself. Without these sudden impulses Borodin might not have composed even as much as he did; but they were not helpful to the planning regime. When Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov started editing the work after his death, they often found themselves adding passages or vocal parts; they had to orchestrate (a process that would involve filling out textures), and they sometimes had to speculate on the exact placing of this or that number in the overall plan of the opera. To this day Prince Igor is a “mobile,” an endless work in progress, that will surely never come wholly to rest.
Khovanshchina, by comparison, was a model of good order. By the start of 1876 Musorgsky had composed act 1, act 2 apart from the final quintet, and a planned scene between Golitsïn and the Lutheran pastor, and was starting act 3 in the happy knowledge that most of its opening scene, Marfa’s song and her confrontation with Susanna, was already in existence. He embarked on the recitative and aria for Shaklovity (his yurodivy-like lament for the fate of Russia) and would very soon have the third act half-done. Then came the cold douche of Stasov’s May letter about the second and third acts. None of its suggestions were adopted, but Musorgsky was sufficiently perturbed by it to go back to his second act and rethink certain aspects, especially the quarrel. But even before any of this could happen, a mere twenty-four hours after writing his pained reply on 15 June (St. Modestus’s Day), he went to Stasov’s apartment on the Nadezhdinskaya, played all evening to him and their friend the sculptor Mark Antokolsky, and prompted a very different reaction from the one in the letter. “I will say,” Stasov wrote to Polixena, “that he’s now composing the best things he’s done so far in Khovanshchina.” And he mentions a scene in which the streltsy wives enter “howling at their husbands and lying down beside the execution blocks and axes, while in the distance the poteshny [Petrine guards] approach” (an early version combining the streltsy scene after Shaklovity’s aria in act 3 with the scene in act 4 in which the streltsy enter carrying their own execution blocks and halberds). But, ominousl
y for Khovanshchina, Stasov continues: “What struck me even more forcibly was the beginning and ending he has attached to Chernobog [Night on Bald Mountain]: he wants to insert this number into his future opera Sorochintsï Fair, and it’s one of the most marvellous things he’s done so far in his entire life.”12 Musorgsky must have led Stasov to believe that he would be composing the Gogol opera once Khovanshchina was finished. In fact he was in the process, not for the first time, of shelving the latter work in favor of the former.
Sorochintsï Fair had now been floating around in Musorgsky’s mind as an operatic subject for at least two years, but as far as is known he had written no music for it. Stasov reports in his biography of the composer that he had first thought of it in 1875 (actually 1874) as a way of creating a Ukrainian role for Osip Petrov, who was himself Ukrainian by birth. Petrov had been an acquaintance at least since 1870, and a close friend since creating the role of Varlaam in the Boris excerpts of 1873. Recently he had been much in Musorgsky’s thoughts, as 1876 was his jubilee year, the fiftieth anniversary of his début as a professional singer, and the composer had been helping Shestakova plan aspects of the ceremony on the stage of the Maryinsky, at which Petrov once again sang the role of Susanin in A Life for the Tsar and a series of grand presentations were made to him between the acts. By this time Musorgsky was a frequent guest of Petrov and his wife, Anna, herself an operatic contralto of some distinction; and he would sometimes accompany “Grandpa,” as he called him, in his public and private performances.
Although Petrov continued performing until his death at the age of seventy-one in 1878, the idea of his ever appearing in a new opera by Musorgsky must always have seemed somewhat fanciful. It is just as likely that the great bass—an enthusiastic admirer of Boris Godunov and of what he knew of Khovanshchina—encouraged Musorgsky to compose Sorochintsï Fair in the hope of tying him down to the completion of both works in progress. It was impossible to be close to Musorgsky in the mid-seventies and be unaware of his unfocused way of working or its various causes. A definite commission might be as good a way as any of concentrating his mind. “The Little Russians [the Petrovs],” Musorgsky tells Kutuzov in November 1877, “fervently beg me to bring Sorochintsï quickly to the stage.” The fact that it caught him at a moment of difficulty with Khovanshchina may have been chance or it may have been part of the motivation. At all events, the Petrov connection was obviously crucial. The jubilee event took place on 21 April 1876, and within two months he had made his preliminary adaptation of his St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain and was talking about Sorochintsï Fair in the same breath as Khovanshchina. By the end of the year, Khovanshchina has virtually disappeared from his correspondence, not to resurface until the summer of 1878. He starts gathering material for the new opera (a girls’ chorus, various Ukrainian folk songs); he draws up a scenario; and he composes pieces, apparently at random: some music for the Gypsy who engineers the “supernatural” events as part of a deal on a cow; a song for the heroine’s crosspatch stepmother; and a significant part of a middle act, starting with the Bald Mountain intermezzo (in the guise of a dream sequence) and continuing with scenes for the stepmother with her husband and with her lover. But of serious dramatic continuity, such as he had been laboriously developing in Khovanshchina, there is little trace. The process is much closer to that of Prince Igor, and it is hardly surprising that the outcome was in general terms much the same.
On the face of it Gogol’s story was a curious choice for Musorgsky at this stage of his career. Its whimsical tale of a young man who falls in love with the carter Cherevik’s daughter at the village fair, and strikes a deal with a Gypsy to sell him a cow at a bargain price if he can persuade the carter and his wife to agree to their marriage, is a million miles from any previous Musorgsky subject—even Gogol’s Marriage, which, as Taruskin points out, is a genuine, if grotesque, comedy of manners, whereas Sorochintsï Fair is a fantastical folk tale, in which, admittedly, the fantasy element is for once fake. The fair is supposed to lie under the curse of a red jacket, pawned by the devil to a Jewish pawnbroker who sold it on and was then attacked by a herd of pigs on stilts; but the pigs’ heads that burst through the windows and terrorize Cherevik and his friends are a trick played by the Gypsy in order to soften the carter up and persuade him to let his daughter marry. There was only one sensible way to set such a plot in the 1870s, and that was with extensive use of folk song, something Musorgsky had hitherto largely avoided.
Admittedly there were recent precedents. Serov’s Power of the Fiend, though not based on Gogol, was similarly a village-fairground tale with diabolical trimmings and much use of folk material. In 1876 Tchaikovsky’s Vakula the Smith, based on another of Gogol’s Dikanka tales, “Christmas Eve,” and freely enriched with authentic folk songs, had its premiere at the Maryinsky; but that was in late November, some months after Musorgsky’s own decision to write a Gogol opera. It’s hard to believe, in any case, that he was suddenly influenced by such models. Had he not told Sasha Purgold: “I know the Gogol subject well. I thought about it some two years ago, but the subject matter doesn’t fit in with the direction I’ve chosen—it doesn’t sufficiently embrace Mother Russia in all her simple-hearted breadth.”13 Simple-hearted, perhaps; but broad, in the historical sense of Boris and Khovanshchina, hardly. Above all it offered little to the keen student of psychology, the sharp observer of human motivation and dark eccentricity, the master of The Nursery, of Boris himself, of Golitsïn and Khovansky. Perhaps it was the very absence of these elements that appealed to him, making it, as he had told Karmalina, “good as an economy of creative strength.”14
Above all, he may have felt that he could write Sorochintsï Fair quickly, then come back refreshed to Khovanshchina. From the start he planned to incorporate his revised Bald Mountain, originally as a dream intermezzo at the beginning of the second act (though it could in truth have fitted in anywhere, being entirely irrelevant to the action); also probably the existing market scene from Mlada, though he seems not to have worked this up until 1880. In less than three months after compiling the scenario, he composed a large part of the second act, starting with the scene in which Khivrya, Cherevik’s wife, manages to wake him up and get him out of the house so that in the next scene she can receive her paramour, the priest’s son, Afanasy Ivanovich. Between these two scenes, she sings a lengthy solo of anticipation: “Come soon, my darling” (“Prikhodi skorey, moy milen’kiy”). But the crucial final scene of the act, in which Cherevik returns with his drinking buddies, Afanasy hides in the attic, and one of the buddies tells the story of the red jacket, gave Musorgsky trouble, and in fact he never managed to compose it. Here the pigs’ heads smash the windows and thrust their snouts into the hut where Cherevik and his friends are drinking. It would be nice to suppose that Musorgsky balked at this scene on grounds of taste. But the real problem was no doubt its sheer intricacy, the long, convoluted narrative, and the violent yet somehow ludicrous climax which, he may have sensed, would be hard to make plausible onstage. The scene is close in dramatic structure to the inn scene of Boris Godunov. But its farcical tone is obviously another matter.
Richard Taruskin suggests that from a technical point of view, the challenge of the earlier scenes in this second act was “just the same” as the challenge of the inn scene (and, he adds, of Marriage as well).15 All three are made up of “uninterrupted dialogue.” The inn scene, it’s true, works a couple of folk songs into the conversation; but they are strictly part of the action, aspects of Varlaam’s tipsiness. The Khivrya scenes in Sorochintsï Fair are treated somewhat differently, with authentic Ukrainian folk tunes providing a significant proportion of the actual dialogue music. The normal kuchka idea was that characters in opera could sing songs (whether or not folk songs) if the plot required it; so Varlaam’s Kazan song, or his “Kak yedet yon,” or Tucha’s revolutionary song in The Maid of Pskov, would be justified, but Marfa’s song in the third act of Khovanshchina not. Khivrya’s and Cherevik’s music in Soroc
hintsï Fair goes still farther in that the folk song is absorbed, as if it were the natural speech of these rustic characters, while retaining its scanned, versified, sometimes rhyming formality. The effect is in fact quite remote from the naturalistic intention of Marriage or the original Boris Godunov, or even from those moments in the revised Boris when the children play clapping games or tell stories in song form. There is about these scenes from Gogol a kind of folksiness that at times comes dangerously close to vaudeville. The quality is superior; Musorgsky always finds nuances in his folk material that lift it out of the ordinary. And yet there remains some indissoluble element of condescension in this urban view of country ways that he had always avoided in his songs about (or sung by) idiots, or children, or distracted seminarians, or the dead.
Stasov hated much of this music, perhaps not only because it had displaced Khovanshchina in Musorgsky’s nonexistent schedule of work. He remarked to Kutuzov that “Musarion … has written a lot of rubbish for The Fair at Soroch. this summer, but after everyone’s attacks (especially mine), has now decided to throw it all away, leaving only the good stuff.”16 Even the faithful Lyudmila was cool. She had told Stasov that Musorgsky had “written some scene for Khivrya and something else, but that it was all terribly mediocre and bloodless, like this whole unfortunate Little Russian undertaking so far.”17 Musorgsky himself reports the circle’s reaction to Kutuzov in different terms but to similar effect:
Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure Page 47